The Return of the Tower of Babel: Chapter One, Trumpism, Part 2
The Dystopian Scoresheet of POTUS 45
2. THE DYSTOPIAN SCORESHEET OF POTUS 45
With imperial disdain, Trump overrode any functional platform or pragmatic governance. Flaunting power while putting on “the best show ever” were his lone objectives, as the Presidency became another ministry for a faux-third-person fascination with himself. He believed that brand and performance art were more imperative than what politicians and intellectuals deemed consequential. The power of the media was too sexy and robust to waste on selling opiates or Toyotas. If you had captured its jinni, you might as well play for the whole pot.
I share “Trump exhaustion” with most of my readers. He is a passing fad who will someday be a mouse that once roared. Despite fascination of some with his twenty-first-century élan, he is a fusty throwback, freeze-dried in the eighties, from the Brylcream hairdo and Nielsen obsession to Y.M.C.A. theme music, Eastern European trophy wives, golf totemism, and former Mayor and police chief Rudy Giuliani as his personal attorney—why not Hunter Thompson’s fictional Raoul Duke as Rudy’s legal assistant?
Unfortunately, we are stillborn in Seinfeld-Cosby Land, so we have to keep deconstructing the Trump regime and its haunt of a commander. Whether you are Republican, RINO (Republican in Name Only), Democrat, independent, or an AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) Green New Dealer, you are either for or against him or can’t calculate the float. But that’s only his policies, the camouflage hiding the real stuff, the reckless narcissism. He likes the title President and its perks without understanding that it’s actually a job and you’re supposed to put in full workdays.
I am talking here about the man when you turn out the lights. Only Melania is there and not even her. Trump is an exemplar of a phase of collective consciousness, an energy field driven by recreational vandalism and autocracy. Monster and mobster, the King in Orange gave his slumlord father a voice and dominion he never dreamed of when he hazed young Donald into being the son of a son of a bitch, a mission at which Fred Trump, Jr. failed before dying young (age 42) of alcoholism and probably parental abuse.
•Donald T. eradicated “factuality” with a barrage of fabrications, fibs, hornswoggles, ordinary and diabolic lies, conspiracy theories, simulated outrages, fake news, claims of fake news, displays of faux innocence, and plain making it up on the fly to suit whatever narrative he was fabricating or alternate probability he wanted to be true. He was a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth while cancelling either, providing plausible deniability from any angle and for any constituency—the sort of guy who flatters and charms while signing papers for your execution.
He made the plausible “d” work, over and over. They could never nail him.
The “lie” was a life-long art for Trump, part of the “deal.” In his pre-presidential career, he fibbed, cheated, and bullied to try to get more than he paid for and erase his myriad mistakes, so that a loss became as good as a win because he could play it as if he had won and make it stick; e.g., sting another party with his bill, counter-sue, or flip the narrative and its energy. It didn’t matter if his victim was a plumber, painter, city, state, country, or planet; he bluffed and berated, denounced, maligned, and litigated until he got his way or made his adversary absorb an asymmetric cost—call it the anti-Buddhahood of Fred Trump, Sr.
Donald was such a practiced, proficient, and compulsive liar that polygraphs may not have worked on him; his nverous system no longer psychophysiologically recognized a lie as a lie.
He overvalued or undervalued assets by self-chosen occasion, stiffed contractors, the City and State of New York, the State of New Jersey, banks as if they were chiffon playthings, and the IRS. He blew off his own signatures on documents as if forgeries, converted bankruptcies and litigations into revenue at others’ expense, and sued like a tinker’s dam. He considered all of it fair game. He took this act to the White House where he performed it, unabashed and unconcerned, in public gaze. Courtesy, sincerity, and fear of blowback were fool’s errands to him. This was the new take on old traditions that his political predecessors completely missed: reconsecrate the Book of Lies. He faulted his Vice-President Mike Pence for being too “honest,” especially when he refused to help overturn the 2020 election results.
Trump had no trouble breaking with perceived precedent; he reveled in it. During the 2016 Presidential debates, when Hillary intimated that not paying fair taxes made him a cheat and crook, he responded with, “It makes me smart.” Once again, she had handed a hitman a loaded gun.
When Trump said things like “It makes me smart” or “I know the system is rigged because I use it,” he was telling his future base, Proud Boys and Deplorables, that he was an insider who would confirm their suspicion that the State was corrupt and, furthermore, that he was in a position to blow it up. That made him a dream candidate, a lone ranger come true.
Donald J. inverted reality to such a degree that “truthing” meant lying. He prevaricated so concertedly and persistently and with such feigned conviction that he stamped his immaculate deceptions onto the world: Obama’s Kenyan birth; a “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; another perfect call with Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensburger; the least racist person in the room; a stolen election. Poet Don Byrd wrote, “He is not a liar. He is the lie itself.”8 He is the lie as Hermes-Thoth is the alphabet and Neptune is the sea.
In the Netflix series based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, the Sandman is Dream or Dream of the Endless. When he comes into contact with humans or throws his sand, dream states occur. Trump is Lie of the Endless. After contact with him or possession by his presence and trident, previously honest and honorable or at least trustworthy people start dropping outrageous fibs if they had lost the distinction between truth and lies or any motivation to make it. After contact with Trump’s aura, lie states just occur.
How theophanic! Donald doesn’t lie to convince people of false facts, he creates facts in order to valorize and make merry the lie, he demonstrates the validity of lying to gain power: yes, he is the lie itself. His underlying nihilism and Trick-or-Treat! mischief sowed morally relativistic disorder, as it empowered his fabrications, creating “alternate truths” and “fake news,” raising gross deceits into fight songs and anthems.
In fact, he openly urged MAGA enthusiasts to create “irrefutable” evidence and run it up flagpoles. It played in a heartland weary of polite losers like John McCain, Jeb Bush, and Mitt Romney. The real Republican base cared more about kicking ass than constitutional democracy, so they flocked to his candidacy of lies like fish to long awaited holy water.
Trump took his conduct up the ladder to the Supreme Court, supposed bastion of judicially balanced scales, where he found Clarence Thomas as malleable and oreo a stooge as house halfback Herschel Walker. (BTW, anti-trans Thomas is the ultimate trans. He thinks that because he likes his penis and has a white hag wife, he can hide his BTWS—black to white supremacist—makeover.)
With weaponized lies, every future Democratic President became instantly illegitimate, though the implications didn’t sink in until after the 2020 election. There was no way for a Republican ever to lose an election—either you won or you claimed fraud, then provided alternate electors. Every generalissimo, autocrat, and dictator knew that.
For Evola, when conducting magical operations, truth and consequences are immaterial. British magician Aleister Crowley epitomized the canon: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,”9 though he stipulated that you not infringe on the will or spiritual freedom of others.
Trump had no such scruples.
Quoting moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, Lachman made a distinction between weaselly fibs and outright fuckery:
“Trump’s eyebrow-raising tweets and other public statements are not examples of his lying but his bullshitting. . . . The bullshitter “is not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true.” He is indifferent to that. “His goal is not to report facts” but to “shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way. Where the liar knows the truth and respects it—he does not want to get caught in his lie—the bullshitter couldn’t care less about it. He isn’t interested in the truth . . . he is interested in the effect that his bullshit . . . in hip-hop lingo, “fuckery” . . . has on his audience. In other words, like positive thinking and chaos magick, in what works . . . Norman Vincent Peale’s belief that ‘attitudes are more important than facts.’”10
That’s what Trump kept telling his Republican colleagues after barging into their club. He said, in effect, “I’m on the Red Team now, and I’m going to teach you how to win. You must be willing to lie, cheat, steal, suborn, blackmail, shame, even murder; there are no rules or ethics anymore; there is only winning. It doesn’t matter if you destroy the planet because winning is more important than living.”
That reductio ad absurdum is vestigial eighties Asperger’s. A pragmatic member of Congress told Carl Sagan then, “If you think nuclear winter and the extinction of humanity is enough to move people in this legislative body, you don’t understand it.”
Once you decide to supersede God, you can destroy and re-create five planets before lunch—and still order your meal on time.
Lachman compares Trump’s “lies” to those of Vladislav Surkov, former political advisor and aide to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, which he dubbed political theater, a synthesis of “Soviet control and Western entertainment,”11 to be admired as political dashboard, mutable beliefs, shapeshifting personae, and ideological chameleonship.12 “[I]t was all a joke, a kind of postmodern art project. . . . It was so ‘obviously’ over the top that if you took it seriously, you had been ‘punked.’”13 That was before the tanks rolled into Ukraine; then even the fawning plutocrats were shocked.
Trump mastered his own shell game with a genius worthy of Houdini and Groucho Marx. He could flash a “you’re an idiot if you take that seriously!” look when he was totally serious.
The Trump-Russia connection, touted and demonized by Nancy Pelosi and other Dem pols, was both more and less than it seemed. Trump had been hanging out with Russian oligarchs for so long that he had turned into one; he didn’t need their sponsorship or shenanigans. He was a Russian asset at so deep a level that all the Steele dossiers and compromising videos, fake or real, were red herrings, prematurely titillating. His base didn’t care if he raped or killed—he boasted that could shoot some asshole on Fifth Avenue and they’d still vote for him—plus they had nothing against Russians: Better Red than Dem. Better a macho Joe Stalin Orthodox Commie than a faggot Elizabeth Warren Socialist.
Putin and assorted oligarchs groomed Trump so skillfully that no one realized he had been groomed, let alone himself. They didn’t need a Manchurian candidate; they supported his building projects and businesses, tacitly and with faux godfather kisses, turning him into their boy toy while he imagined he was driving the Hummer. He was Putin’s president as much as a malleable child groomed by a pedophile is an amenable queer.
Lachman correlates Bannon’s and Kellyanne Conway’s sendups of Trump to Surkov’s projection of Putin himself as “a kind of magician, transforming him from macho outdoorsman and commando to postmodern tsar and global leader, star of the nation’s most popular reality-TV show. It was ‘factual entertainment,’ a blend of “show business and propaganda, ratings and authoritarianism.”14 Like Trump, Putin bought into it, deciding ultimately that Peter the Great and Joe Stalin had nothing on him. He could beat them both in judo, and Elon Musk too. Poor Ukrainians!
Again, Trump didn’t need Putin to model such tactics or blackmail him into compliance: there was no Russiagate because it was all Russiagate. He boogied into a de facto Manchurian candidate without a blink; he had been boogying that way for decades, perhaps with real Russkie mob patronage and loans. He may not have performed chaos magic at Surkov’s echelon or with Putin’s élan, but he had a low bar to meet: madmen-mesmerized Americans.
Weaponizing lies was Mob-genre chaos magic. Manifesting the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth from bankruptcies, calumnies, omertàs, and spare parts was voodoo of the highest order!
•Donald John blew off civility, impartiality, good faith, fairness, separation of powers, judicial independence, and broadly held tenets of common, civil, and constitutional custom and law. Shakedowns, extortions, threats, and shaming were quicker and more efficient. Like any aspiring strongman, he ignored process and tried to impose his personal will. Like any small-time hood, he didn’t let a mill of interest go uncollected.
He had neither tolerance nor aptitude for democratic institutions, peer collaboration, or collegial compromise. He was a born oligarch. “Mafia” was the lone hierarchy he knew or respected. He didn’t understand why, since he won the presidency and that was better than don of a family or business, he couldn’t sic the IRS on his enemies. His ultimately-dismissed chief of staff John Kelly was surprised that when POTUS asked for someone’s proverbial throat to be slit, he presumed it would be done. That’s how hierarchies and service with advantages work.
To Trump, democracy was Mafia Lite; it had to be because troop hierarchy was the first law of nature, practiced by alpha males in gorilla troupes and baboon bands and by war chiefs in tribes and duchies from time immemorial. Constitutional rhetoric was useful mainly to candy-coat borderline or outright unconstitutional schemes—it was verbiage to cover snatch, dragoon, and grift. On Al Capone’s turf, you get only what you pay for, in blood and loyalty.
Despite its legacy of democracy, America’s corporate royalty proved as frightened of and corrupted by this guy and his base as Mexicans are by their own narco-lords and hitmen. They not only wouldn’t put him in jail for blatant crimes of using his office for racketeering and outright treason, they won’t even disqualify him from running again—Repubs and Democrats alike bore their plaints and warrants on eggshells.
Whatever else you think or choose to believe, the U.S. elected a mafia family to run the country. A goon squad must have been what they had in mind; they had seen enough Sopranos and Godfather re-runs and Italian and Mexican operas to know.
When Trump came up short in the 2020 election, his instinct was straight out of Mario Puzo’s pilot Godfather novel: make people know the price of not acting out your bidding, give honest citizens a choice between doing their job and what is right or risking your fury and their lives. Innocence, fairness, compassion—“James Stewarts” in “wonderful lives”—none of that mattered to him. They were cruelly sacrificed on the altar of Trumpian extortion and the need to appear almighty, impregnable, and in control.
Trump’s own court bureaucrats blew him out of office only because most Americans still paid lip service to impartiality, truth, and fairness in 2021. We’ll see how that plays in 2024.
Addressing a gathering of Republican donors at the Hilton Hotel in McLean, Virginia (March 2022), the last pre-Trump Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, laid out the stark historical landscape: “[He] told the crowd that he has a chart in his Senate office tracing the history of civilizations over the past 4,000 years. He said it is a reminder of how they can rise and collapse, and of how unusual American democracy is in global history. From the Mongol Empire to the Roman Empire, Romney said, autocracy is the chart's ‘default setting,’ with authoritarian leaders at every turn. ‘We are really the only significant experiment in democracy, and preserving liberal democracy is an extraordinary challenge.’”15
We’re the four-leaf clover, the blue-green waterworld among molten Mercuries, airless Marses, and Jovian gasballs. Trump wasn’t just a throwback or passing asteroid; he is the default setting, with a lot of dead kings and khans, and cyclonic Red spots in his sails. He knew autocracy as well as he knew his name.
Among Carl Jung’s archetypes are hero, sage, artist, puer (child), animus and anima (female and male romantic infatuations), shadow, rebel, magician, lover, ruler, trickster or jester, caregiver, and everyman. There is also “king.” Like each of the others, it has both beneficent and malign expressions. Trump’s royal entitlement came at a time of widespread global authoritarianism—politicians, rulers, and bosses expressing aspects of an ascending archetype. Trump stepped right into imperial atavism, and mass consciousness matched his move. That’s how he could get away with claiming to be second only to Jesus: he was a manifestation of the archetypal high king.
MAGA’s “A” and “G” (for “American” and “Greatness”) meant dispensing with nuisances of democracy and replacing them with Trump family rule, hoped-for succession by Don, Jr. In Trump’s view, it was not only the divine right of kings but homage to his stable genius. Once judges and companies reported directly to King Donald, the enlightened monarch, America would run efficiently again, while tithing to the golfing crowd would lift all boats (whether it did or not). His praetorian guard would put down any uprisings.
•Fred Trump’s boy delighted in recreational cruelty and strategic shaming; he routinely mocked, disparaged, baited, trolled, and belittled. His food-fight mentality and skillset were made for a social-media world of tweet wars and revenge porn under internet camouflage. He shined!
“People are very vicious,” he proposed, both privately and publicly, a guiding sutra, along the lines of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” only different. In other words, be what other people are, only do it better.*
He sentenced individuals to digital equivalents of stocks, pillory, and draaikooi. No schoolyard taunt was too menial to sling, no caricature too crude, infantile, or heinous to snatch in wounding an enemy and chirping like a rooster. In his own words, you had to “punch back ten times harder.” At a motivational seminar hosted by self-help guru Tony Robbins, “[Trump] told the crowd that paranoia. . . and how to hold a grudge. . . [were] crucial to success. ‘You have to realize that people are very vicious. . . . When a person screws you, screw them back fifteen times harder.”16 (On other occasions, he upped it to “a hundred times harder” and “five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even.”) Scale was stretched by endemic meter, but endemic to what? What fuels an eternal engine of spite and rage?
Early in his 2016 campaign, Trump gave a preview of his ingrained conduct by mocking a disabled reporter who had once challenged him in print, doing a childlike imitation of his Parkinson’s tremors, then denying that’s what he did. It was a grade-school routine—looking around the room for an imaginary perpetrator of a sneaky impertinence— straight out of Buddy Hackett’s tummler repertory, but meaner. His fans went crazy just like when he pretended to be a rasslin’ referee pounding the mattress or pageant judge sampling the butts of beauty contestants—they thought him so much more honest and entertaining than Politicians Central, so much more the way they would be in his place. “Vote the guy in!” they shouted. “Keep the show running.” He took that casino to the jackpot.
“Look at that face,” he declared of primary opponent Carly Fiorina. “Would anyone vote for that? I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"17
Tossing unfiltered brickbats at rivals changed the rules of the game and left his foes scurrying to imitate him and catch up. Good luck at that! “Sandbox” was Donald’s chosen weapon. His Republican imitators look either lame and ridiculous or like crude humorless hectorers. Trump brought a veneer of outer-borough charm and dry mafia wit.
A cowardly ruffian who surrounded himself with goons to carry out his whims, Trump crowed repeatedly, after ordering the execution of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (January 7th, 2020), as if he had done it with his own bare hands, a reprise of his response to the assassination of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadiin a less antiseptic showdown. “He died like a dog!” Trump boasted, as if he would have died differently in the same circumstances. But that’s bullyhood 101. In the Iranian rubout’s aftermath, Trump feared the long hand of Revolutionary Guard retaliation, so he doubled up on his bodyguards, and hightailed back to D.C.
While campaigning a few years earlier, he dissed Naval officer John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”18
That he could mock a survivor of the Hanoi Hilton gave him hex power over the entire Vietnam narrative, including his own bone-spur deferment. He didn’t need to get captured like West Point stooges; he could bribe the North Vietnamese up front, and isn’t that what finally happened? And they us? Falling dominos hardly matter in transnational capitalism— just erect another hotel or lay concrete for another plaza.
•Usually overlooked is a harbinger of Trump and his MAGA creed of vulgar magic: Hunter Moore and his 2010-2012 revenge-porn website called isanyoneup.com. Moore’s trajectory remarkably paralleled Trump’s just six years earlier. Starting as an afficionado of naughty nightlife with a goal of getting as much sex as he could from admirers and fans—another knucklehead after ass—Moore found revenge porn so profitable that he course-corrected. He encouraged nudes and mementos from all sources but highlighting romances gone bad (hence the term “revenge porn”). When he couldn’t get enough of those to fulfill the potential of his site by volunteer revenge seekers, he collaborated with a tech-savvy colleague to hack cell phones and steal women’s private photos—a crime.
With unlimited merchandise and the shock value of mainly women finding intimate private pictures of themselves suddenly gone viral, Moore’s revenge porn turned into a delivery service of “Daily Hate”—smears, curses, taunts, and diabolisms solicited for all images—as Moore blew off decency as well as suicidal consequences with folks whose images he stole by spyware, declaring himself proudly a “life ruiner.” In fact, he revelled in the misery, discomfort, and shame he caused.
Do you see the proto-Trumpism? As Moore’s site “views” exploded into the mid-millions, just to get on isanyoneup men and women (eternal adolescents) took selfies or had themselves photographed masturbating, shoving bottles and other objects into their orifices, and brushing their teeth with urine or feces. One woman snorted coke off Moore’s erect penis.
Something about the deep ontological basis of limits is elicited by the attempt to eradicate them altogether. The only way finally to do so is by creative masochism, which is never creative. On the nether side of dignity and a standard of personal elegance is only a court jester and a harlot.
What Moore also demonstrated was the power of internet bullying and cultism, and he took erotic sadism and sexual abuse out of the closet. His pre-internet forerunners included Jim Jones at his People’s Temple and David Koresh with his Branch Dravidians. But Moore blew past mere religious devotions and guru fetichism and founded a sacred bullying cult, which made him an idol to others, especially moody young male devotees. He became near untouchable. If anyone challenged him or reported his behavior to investigative agencies or the media, he sicced his followers, called The Family, on them. They threatened to murder Moore’s foes, rape their daughters and wives, and burn down their houses. It was a half-camp neo-fascist foreshadowing of MAGA and Trump’s numberless band of enforcers, and it even worked for a while.
Moore wasn’t as invulnerable as he presumed. A persistent L.A. parent (Charlotte Laws), a former Marine cybersecurity entrepreneur (James McGibney), and the FBI collaborated to close down isanyoneup, put Moore in jail for a few years, and take him permanently off the internet. His cult was dead, but the model had proven its worth. It only needed a master Life Ruiner and Twitterer to take it to the top.
Trump not only taunted; he specialized in extortion and sadism. Like Moore, he dehumanized adversaries to the point of putting their lives and the lives of their families at risk. He encouraged threats, badgering, and real-time violence by fans. If Right-to-Life vigilantes could gun down abortion doctors, why couldn’t Donald’s groupies hound and intimidate his foes, especially from the anonymity of the internet?
Moore was a nobody hiding in his mother’s basement in Sacramento; Donald was king of New York. Moore was a porno-maniac, a bottom-feeder and groupie collector; Donald was a fascist gourmand.
To the Donald, it was more a rich man’s game than a real thing. There was no real thing. Or his life was the only “real thing.” “Imitation of Trump” became like the fifteenth-century canon Thomas á Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ”: if you imitate the son of God, you will become like him. If you imitate Donald, you can win votes from his base and become a player in his reign; look at Lindsay Graham, Matt Gaetz, Marco Rubio. The Papacy proved more powerful than monetized pranksterism.
•Donald didn’t discriminate non-white races, tribes, or cultures from one another, as he incited systemic violence against Muslims, Chinese, and assorted ethnic mongrels. In America, that meant generic Middle Eastern and Asian because (per Hollywood) Pakistani, Lebanese, and Bangladeshi actors were interchangeable, as were Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, and Chinese Americans or Mexicans and Syrians, Armenians and Turks, Sikhs and Taliban.
He encouraged random attacks against Jews, Arabs, Brazilians, and Russians, down-market landsmen of folks that, in the international arena, he recruited as co-conspirators. He played it both ways, cozying up to those he was betraying. Since people are innately vicious, that’s what you have to do.
He had no real allies or friends, as he had no full human identity. He was greed, revenge, apathy, indifference, and sloth personified, even as he was the embodiment of mendacity. He wore these masks until they grafted themselves onto him like a puppet in a Noh play. He was jaws, gut, and genitals attached to an algorithm. His neurotransmitters registered happy hormones instead of guilt at any random and collateral damage he caused. They fed his energy field and temporarily assuaged his OCD and ADD.x
His Baby Huey megalomania, vanity, and greed fused into a single compound emotion: schadenfreude, the joy of witnessing and causing the pain, downfall, and humiliation of others. That’s one of the hungry ghosts of the Tibetan bardo-after-death as well as a circle of Dante’s hell.
•After the 2020 election, when every other avenue of outrage had been blocked and he had been talked out of recreationally bombing Iran and told he couldn’t declare martial law to nullify Biden’s victory, he spent his last days in office rushing executions of Federal prisoners. He didn’t want to risk their survival into a more lenient regime. The power to kill excited him. Push a button, some dude dies, and you hold the moral high ground too. What a buzz!
Murder by hire was Donald’s inclination. He was a mafia don with the blood lust of a hitman and sadist.
I’m not sure he even understood death or made a distinction between executing someone and firing them. He may grokked the finality intellectually, but the personhoods of other people had no meaning to him, not as value equivalent to his own. Why not kill when you can get away with it? It’s what tough guys do.
•He valorized perverse and brutal behavior while ridiculing empathy, leniency, and good will, shattering all pretexts of grace, sportsmanship, and neighborliness in American life. He made it cool and vogue to cheat, steal, bash, infringe, and pamper his most nefarious impulses. Using the bully pulpit, he metastasized his tactics through the legislatures, school boards, workplaces, classrooms, social media, bar rooms, forums, iPads, playgrounds, and playing fields of America. He triggered a pandemic of rudeness, road rage, umbrage, gaslighting, vilifying, and acting out, by rhetoric or gun. His power to effect that so spooked the Republican party that it reduced most of them to his submissive stooges. MAGA replaced the Republican brand. He imposed his private pathology on America because he could. With SNCCy chairman H. Rap Brown, he declared violence as “American as cherry pie.” As ironical too.
Bringing out uncharted layers of recreational cruelty and retribution in a nation he proposed to make great again was, in fact, a Satanic nobility he sought. He exposed the dishonesty of the progressive Left with its social-justice affectations and inclusionary gimmicks. Under their frocks, he knew, they were just as callous, vicious, and “it’s collateral damage, so who gives a fuck?” as himself. He offered them a heroic dose of their own medicine—and the poor and disenfranchised hillbillies loved it! He gave a voice to a voiceless underclass as well as to those who believed that skin color as a hard signifier transcended all other personal attributes.
•He didn’t understand empathy, compassion, mercy, humility, mindfulness, the Four Noble Truths or Eightfold Noble Path. They didn’t compute, and he wasn’t curious as to why they did to others. He consigned the lot—the humble, pious, merciful, and moral—to “chumps.”
His Studio 54/gangs of New York/supermodel mind didn’t grok that karma wasn’t New Age bunk. He thought it was someone else’s shtick when, at root, it’s a force capable of igniting suns and sometimes whole universes, to enact its liege. More acreage than a Scottish golf links. . . .
He didn’t recognize his own plump and growing bundle of karma because calibers of responsibility and conscience didn’t register. It was ripening inside him and would fission till slaked, perhaps a million solar years from now in some other universe. Orson Welles of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons augured Trump’s death-bed script:
And now the Donald was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life. He was occupied with the first really important matter that had taken his attention since he came home after the Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime between then and today—all his buying and building and trading and banking and conning and cheating and lying, that it was all trifling and waste beside what concerned him now. For the Donald knew that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as a Trump—not sure of anything . . . . 19
Psychic teacher John Friedlander put the real denouement in explicit terms:
The point is not the person with the most toys or the most money wins or whatever that phrase was in the sixties or seventies. The purpose is to engage life, to engage this drama, to engage this conversation. Those systems that go too far the other way make that category as if it were real and lock you into a sense that if you were in pain, you just simply haven't figured out the right technique.
That's not the way things work. The Dalai Lama didn't get exiled from Tibet because he didn't understand creative visualization; he got exiled because life is rich and complex and deeply meaningful. Even horrors like that are rich and complex and deeply meaningful.20
That’s how karma ripens, minute by minute, lifetime by lifetime. Trump may have understood creative visualization (the Norman Vincent Peale version), but he didn’t grasp the richness, complexity, and paradox of reality, or its accumulation of psychic debt, so he was profligate. He destroyed individuals, reputations, lives, and institutions from sheer spite—an absurd misjudgment of his own exemption and invulnerability or of how much free karma anyone has to burn. He is carrying a shitload for his next incarnation.
•The self-declared “stable genius” was undeterred by his own ignorance, just as he was undaunted by his non sequiturs, puerile vocabulary, and lack of nuanced knowledge on any topic or polity. He told the FBI and CIA that he knew more about Kim Jong-un than all their research because he could read him like an eligible dame at first glance, a stranger across a crowded room. His guides were in his belly. Belly was both microcosm and macrocosm, Book of Knowledge and Book of Law. In 2022, he would claim clairvoyance on its basis.
At a summit of nations where mutual tribute and respect were de rigeur, Donald asked Turkish Premier Recep Erdogan about the movie Midnight Express, as if his country fit on a Hollywood poster or in a tin can. According to foreign-affairs specialist Fiona Hill, "Some leaders . . . would get angry in meetings or on calls when Trump obviously had no idea what they were talking about. . . . [E]veryone knew that Trump never paid attention to his brief."21 During tête à têtes with Trump, foreign leaders made intentionally inaccurate claims to gain an upper hand. But Trump also threw people off their strategies by his absolute ignorance. It’s hard to defeat a cipher
•Trumpism was sourced in a game show with no competing curriculum. Its game-master was trapped in “gangs of New York” synth-pop. The buck never stopped, just new contestants and more hoopla. In a landscape of made-up realities and interchangeable parts, proficiency was consigned to one-upmanship. Trump relegated the U.S. Presidency to a WWF-like morality play, presuming that ratings were the main goal, even as real children were locked in cages, families were deported or went hungry, or hid from the ICE police, and 400,000 were dying of a pandemic. Ratings were the goal. If people voted for you, you got the sort of power that would have made John Gotti green with envy. When other Republicans worried about cozying up to White supremacists, Donald reminded them, “Those people vote.” End of discussion.
Trump admitted that he watched the little red light on the media cameras and adjusted his one-liners to keep it on. Comedian Aziz Ansari named it: Donald produced content. When Barack Obama said, “There’s no red state America, there’s no blue state America; there’s the United States of America,” that was rhetoric. When Trump said, “I hate Mexicans,” that was content.
In private, politicians like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Matt Gaetz conceded (post-2020) that it was all a performance—staged villains, simulated bombast. They too came to prefer Reality Shows to actual governance because they believed there was still enough slack in the vault, and showtime is more entertaining and gainful than trying to get shit done, which backfires anyway because it is used politically against any fool who attempts it. As long as they could print money, they might as well substitute play for governance because that’s what their fans wanted. They went crazy over this stuff at MAGA rallies, a High-Church version of WWF tag-team.
Trump correctly gauged where the conversion of television into the internet had taken the American mind and its attention span: into epidemic polarization and divisiveness. Getting “likes,” “shares,” and followers was like keeping the red light on. Being an influencer was more important and lucrative than cultivating a skill or doing anything. Trump not only brought Rasslin’ to campaigns, he reduced campaigns to carnivals.
The ploy was so effective, Donald boasted, that he could beat George Washington with Abraham Lincoln as George’s running mate. Why not? Cartoon villainy and cyborg phantoms trump—literally—Socratic debates. Neither Washington nor Lincoln took that into account.
•Americans were already in a “Truman Show” bubble. They didn’t understand what life was like in Juarez, Mogadishu, or Sanaa—how hard it is to achieve a working democracy, how easy to break. They wanted to be flattered, hoodwinked, regaled, amused, more than they wanted to be challenged or free.
Over the border, women were being kidnapped off common paths by Zeta gangs. Children were wandering homeless on the streets of Beirut. Glaciers were melting, coral reefs dying. Countries in Central America were failing. None of that was real or likely to affect them or their children and grandchildren. That’s how the revolution, on the other side, always starts.
In Shawn Triplett’s viral Reddit photo, a Kentucky movie theater was left intact by December 2021 tornados except where the rectangle of the screen was ripped out. The photo depicts the relationship between two realities: a dark room with cushioned seats for an imaginary audience that looks into bright devastation and debris. The trope is ineluctable; we can watch climate change, the flooding of coastlines, and the bombardment of Aleppo, Mariupol, Dresden, and Zhytomyr as if on an open installation.
Beasts of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga’s feature film of doped child militias in Sierra Leone, begins with a screen-less t.v. chassis, lacking guts and tube, through which children watch each other cavort with UN protectors while the so-called “Native Defense Forces,” a child army under a nameless pedophile commandant and his lieutenant Two I-C approach the village.
•The Trump White House had a Playboy Club feel to it, not even so much the players—after all, the Clinton White House had a Playboy feel too, the Midwestern rather than the bicoastal version. Beyond Bill, though, were real diplomats and bureaucrats; the Playboy Club feel was Donald’s actual gaze. It turned everything around him a tad debauched and tawdry, sometimes more than a tad. There was himself, Giuliani, Steve Mnuchin, and assorted other “dirty old men” as well as his own sons and all of their wives, ex-wives, and mistresses, but that wasn’t the issue as much as the fact that beauty pageants and sexcapades caught POTUS 45’s attention-deficit attention more than the Federal Reserve or Earth’s geography, let alone international diplomacy. He was more interested in who Hope Hicks was sleeping with than with what she did in her job.
Other presidents might have fantasized secretly, but Trump never saw the problem with making his prurience overt, public and senior. He turned a brutal North Korean dictatorship into innuendos of gay coquetry between him and Kim Jong-un (including missiles as penises for the Rocket Man masturbator) and expected everyone else—meaning real diplomats and intelligence officers—to buy it as the true state of things on the ground and a way to avoid a Korean war. It was only insofar as it befuddled everyone, including the North Koreans, who tried but were unable to play it to their advantage.
Like a cartel warlord, Trump governed by patronage—his “king” archetype. It proved to be his most limiting and damning provinciality and made everything else he did, however global or puissant, small-time. Putting daughter Ivanka, sons Donald, Jr. and Eric, daughter-in-law Lara, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Donald, Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, in positions for which they had no aptitude, qualifications, or training, he turned diplomacy into slapstick, foreign affairs into beauty pageants. He paraded stooges, pansies, and amateurs across a dais where they got eaten alive by surviving pit bulls of the world’s fiercest rings. He even wanted to make Ivanka president of the World Bank because “she’s good with numbers.” That’s the mark of a dictator so isolated that he trusts no one except his kin and in-laws, and them only so far. With a limited talent pool, being good with numbers was the only necessary qualification for managing global economies.
Trump didn’t care about diplomacy as long as he got good prices for weapons of mass destruction, accumulated personal favors, souvenirs, gifts, and classified documents for later redemption, while shitting on landscapes and troublemakers in the good-for-nothing Third World.
Some Republicans may have made their peace with a 2024 rerun of Donald for his Wall Street merits and court appointees, but do they want to bring back a supporting cast of Don, Jr., Ivanka, Jared, Lara, Eric, and Melania? Can the world survive a second regnum?
•POTUS 45 operated solely by “what’s in it for me?” The purpose of any endeavor was to further his interests, feather his nest, inflate his self-esteem, bolster his power or popularity, or dishonor and discombobulate his opponents.
He wanted to be President for Life and assumed it was one stunt or coup away. Everything else he had tried had worked; he had sued or bluffed his way out of any mistakes. His enemies were exhausted and in retreat.
The Presidency was his personal possession, he believed, like a bought bimbo at a strippers’ club. It was the ultimate prize in a life of trying to make the hollowman less hollow. Journalist Bob Woodward explained this after he released his recorded discussions with a boastful king who treated him like a and royal scribe:
Trump said: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.”
Woodward wrote: “The voice, almost whispering and intimate, is so revealing. I believe that is Trump’s view of the presidency. Everything is mine. The presidency is mine. It is still mine. The only view that matters is mine.”22
He believed he had committed the perfect crime or won the lottery forever. He was surprised that there was no failsafe measure to keep him in office. He went to Plan B: lie and keep lying so relentlessly that fewer and fewer people remember the truth.
The majority of voters, and a super-majority of Republicans, began to think, maybe you did win, else why all the fuss?
Outlast everyone! Pull out all the stops. No one knows where you will quit because you never actually do. It worked for Putin and Xi with much less effort.
•Donald loved a pageant, so he adored the January 6th surge. Outrage on his behalf suited his mien of sacred martyrdom. Once he was no longer President, he wanted the country to fail, even go bankrupt, people to starve. Lots of great visuals there! If he could sabotage America without getting caught or personally harmed, he would watch successive disasters unfold with glee. It served a vibration somewhere between diabolic and trickster archetypes. On January 6th, 2021, he become the Devouring Mother.
It is not uncommon for politicians to root against the opposition. Both political parties do it covertly. Sometimes a pol expresses the agenda openly, like Mitch McConnell’s intention to make Barack Obama “a one-term President.” Trump took it a step or five further. He made destroying the country a patriotic duty, to get his revenge on the commie Democrats and pandering RINOs, to stymie economic recovery under usurper Biden—collateral damage and casualties be damned. His motto was “No one steals from me!” That is, no one lives to enjoy it. Trump is Mothman-meets-Al Capone.
No bridges or roads should get repaired or potholes filled unless they fell under his watch, scored on the virtue sheet of Donald or registered to his patronymic and brand. Confirming his legacy as master builder, the only one who knew how to get it done right, was more important than getting it done right or whether it was done at all.
Trumpism became the new patriotism: MAGA replacing not just party but nation. Because in his mind, “Donald” was more substantial and important. He would sacrifice every last scintilla of national unity to build his personal Trump brand.
While in office, he so wanted to get back at Blue states and sanctuary cities that he proposed yanking criminals, murderers, rapists, and Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang members from among illegal immigrants and depositing them in San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and New York. Mafia 101. Then watch the mayhem in the daily crime reports, the bloodier the better—more WWF.
•His conflicting wimp and strongman personae led to venerating the planet’s extant dictators and tyrants: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping.
That the only question Donald ever asked was “What good will it do me?” elicited—from the Emirates to North Korea to Ukraine—the counter-ask: “What’s it gonna take?”23
The “art of the deal” dealer was getting back a penny, if that, on the dollar, but he didn’t give a shit as long as the penny was his and the dollar came out of someone else’s pocket. Tilting the playing field was his highest pleasure, at any real cost.
That’s why it wasn’t hard to believe that he took top-secret, even nuclear-weapon-oriented documents from his closing chaos at the People’s House to Mar-a-Lago. Was it to sell to the higher bidder, U.S. enemies included (‘they’re not my enemies’), or to use as leverage or blackmail or for some other nefarious purpose? Or was it just possessiveness, a lack of confidence that his Presidency was real and not a dream. That goes back to his not understanding the job and its duties in the first place, so his time in office flew by while others did the work and distracted him from big-time damage.
Like the raven in a Robert Kelly poem, Donald cawed, “feed me because I cry louder. . . . / because I am alive & make noise. . . / because I can crack the cheap bowl of your sky with my shriek. . . . / because I am hungry / & cry louder than any other.”24
That he did—louder and to more flocks than any other vertebrate. He was the archetype of a hunger that can never be sated. To put him on a tree in Chiapas and a raven in the White House clarifies the rebus.
•He had no use for “the greatest generation.”
In an original Star Trek episode, Captain Kirk fissioned into two “Kirks” from a transporter malfunction as he was being beamed back to starship Enterprise from fictional planet Alpha 1777. One “Kirk” arrived docile, indecisive, and ineffective; the other was a swaggering, over-sexed wildman.25 Yet the Enterprise needed both qualities—fiery inspiration and humble integrity—in one leader.
While the parallel is inexact, Trump’s goal was to split “Captain America” into clashing nations that he could manipulate at his whim: Proud Boys and Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, a compliant beadledom and a rabid, racist mob.
Yet without both Americas—Red America and Blue America, hillbillies, rednecks, African Americans, immigrants, and First Nations bonding in platoons and foxholes against a common enemy—the U.S. wouldn’t have stopped the Nazis at Normandy or the Japanese imperial army and navy at Guadalcanal and Corregidor. It couldn’t have saved France, England, Belgium, and the Philippines. Today’s America, without a common culture or moral compass, can’t win a border spat with Mexico, let alone World III. (Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, like Grenada and Panama, were corporate police actions and Halliburton subcontracts.)
•By trivializing melting glaciers and making a joke of mistaking weather (cold snaps) for climate (wind and ocean currents), Trump gave his followers an alibi for blowing off the catastrophe they were foisting on their children and grandchildren: millennials and Zoomers.
The few times that he paused to take in the big picture, the world in which he was performing, Trump didn’t believe that climate change was fake. His first caporegime, Steve Bannon, was CEO of Biosphere 2, an apocalypse-driven experiment in underground prepper living for the elite. Bannon has spoken with eloquent precision about primary and secondary effects of greenhouse gases.
Trump’s stance came down to, it isn’t happening, but even if it is, we can’t do anything about it—it’s caused by sunspots and Chinese coal—so those with enough wealth might as well enjoy food, sex, and private jets while they can, and dig underground shelters for brief overrides, and let’s not inconvenience my base otherwise.
•He added insult to injury by offering to purchase the glaciers from Denmark and turn Greenland into a golf course once they melted (scale aside, imposing his brand on antediluvian tundra. Then, of course, he passed it off as a joke. That was sheer eighties’ cant: the idea of climate as jokeable or trivial. Remember those early ice-blue billboards recommending lemon colas as the remedy for global warming.
That hid in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, how seriously the King took buying a whole freakin’ subcontinent. “It’s just gigantic!” he enthused. It is: 3.2 times the size of Texas. It would be a mega real-estate purchase, a 51st-State guarantee of President for Life and proof that a debt merchant and carny was the perfect choice for American CEO. Climate makeover was an investment opportunity, a convergence of fake denials with actual gluttony. His racist afterthought was to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland like in a board game. The Danes were not merely unamused; they were so flabbergasted they barely knew how to respond. When someone approaches a complex situation with an unnuanced parody of it, that’s a crisis in diplomacy, especially if he’s President of the United States.
That massive ice floes could be bought and sold cheaply, a penny on the dollar, was pure Trumpian fantasy, another Reality show in lieu of reality. Reality is ecospheres, gravity, orbits, canyons, icebergs, and continental drift. Musing about building a golf course on the site of millennially melting ice is akin to musing about drinking bleach to kill a virus or building a casino on Mars or calling any female Native American politician Pocahontas or declassifying documents by breathing on them.
This Loony Tunes version of reality comes from watching too much “Tom and Jerry,” “Donald Duck,” and “Heckle and Jeckle,” while attention-deficiting your way through a baccalaureate. The Trump MAGA cabal, whatever else it was, was an indictment of a pabulum school system, a cult made up of graduates of Little Red Schoolhouse madrasas who saw the world in a Popeye-versus-Bluto fashion and assumed that anyone who viewed it differently was an elitist phony.
This is a characteristic of gangsta culture in urban ghettos, too. You don’t like someone, some jerk pisses you off and disrespects you—zap them, shoot’em dead. Reality is a series of one-liners in a sitcom: “superfly” noir. Death isn’t really death because life is only a facsimile of life, a series of fun tropes. Then you’re dead.
•Behind Donald’s casino was a shadow play against a hyperobject bigger than those Kuiper Belt planets that start at Pluto and Makemake and end somewhere short of the heliopause with dark silent Planet X and Zecharia Sitchin’s 12th Apostle, Nibiru.26
The massive gravity of that ice is real as well as mythic, as well as Norse in the Old Icelandic/Greenlandic (or proto-Indo-European) sense, so we better be ready for what Green Land holds in its frozen rivers and melting seas and gorges as well as its payback for dissipating Gaia’s wealth at Neptunian scale.
Greenland is not for sale because it can’t be for sale, any more than the woodlands of Quebec were for sale. Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland represent a sixteenth-century crossing that broke Mediaeval Europe’s cosmographic barrier—which had been on default setting since Augustine and Plotinus despite Irish and Norse transatlantic fisheries—and plunged it into mystery realms of Homer, Hesiod, lost continents Doggerland and Sundaland, and Ultima Thule. The likes of Columbus, Cabot, and Cortez (and Shakespeare of The Tempest) made it stick.
The subsequent de-indigenization, de-forestation, and un-shamanizing—deconsecrating—of the land led to the current Queens-Atlantic City-Mar-a-Lago techno-fascist wannabe police state, loading a dose of retro capitalism and warlordism into American cosmogony. Now meta-Norse Sagas stretch from the Russian oligarchy and weaponization of the Arctic to Jair Bolsonaro’s torching of the Amazon like some petty arsonist putting global oxygenization on the grill of a narco-state or anti-narco-state—they’re interchangeable throughout Central and South America.
Greenland remains an amulet, a “green” dowsing- and stepping-stone crystal, a symbolic and actual iceball, set ticking in the Pleistocene. It is as endemic to the Solar System’s elemental spiral as the Jovian moon Callisto. It fluctuates in a phase of “crossing” from raw nucleic-acid comet to pre-Cambrian palindromic biome, from Old World to New, from hominid to Homo sapiens, from Holocene to Anthropocene, from hunting and gathering to farming to urbanization and dwarf eco-tourism.
Trump called the response of Denmark’s Mette Frederickson “nasty,” another of his overused infantilisms, but it wasn’t nasty enough given what it is at stake: the planetary thermostat, the North Atlantic turbine, traces of ice found not so long ago as far south as Argentina.27
•Trump’s 2022 joke about finding out who in the bureaucracy leaked the Supreme Court draft opinion that overturned Roe V. Wade—suggesting that the reporter or publisher of the paper be threatened with prison and “becoming the bride of another prisoner very shortly”—betrayed five things as well as the fact that Trump found prison rape humorous more than reprehensible: 1. He had his own sexual fantasies about being a prisoner’s bride, perhaps in a female bastille, or imprisoning someone, perhaps a guy in a homosexual fantasy; 2- He had a horror of being imprisoned, appropriated, and violated himself (not of being sent to jail for his crimes but finding himself there without explanation, held by his enemies, perhaps Iranian Revolutionary Guards); 3- He handled both the horror and the kinky desires by putting them in a joke and pretending they had nothing to do with him except for his delight in sick humor; 4. He tended to hide his most private fantasies by blurting them out and projecting them on others; 5. He never read Freud on jokes and the unconscious.
•Trump dubbed the Mueller investigation and inquiry into his affairs as not only a witch hunt but the greatest witch hunt in the history of—pick one—the “nation,” “world,” “universe.” (He called it a witch hunt because of the same cliché-driven speech defect that said “Pocahontas” every time he thought “Elizabeth Warren” and “Old Crow” every time he thought “Mitch McConnell”).
It was a witch hunt, though secular pols didn’t understand that the witch was a witch. They were after a Putin-backed Manchurian candidate when they should have been after something more wiccan and dangerous.
•Trump covered his crimes, excesses, betrayals, outright stupidity, and gluttony in transcendent divinity, “Orange Jesus,” as one Republican lawmaker called him off the record. He could be an atheistic, philandering, stone-casting, hate-mongering Christian. He could be a White Supremacist racist who did more for African Americans than any other president except Abraham Lincoln. He could cage and deport Latin Americans, yet increase his Hispanic support. He could levy farm-bankrupting tariffs on China, Canada, and the EU, yet maintain a farm-belt following. He could be a greedy slumlord, yet come off as a working-class populist—but so could Joseph Stalin. He could be a rich, greedy, self-centered crook, yet get consecrated as a saint and hero by the very folks he swindled. He could wave the “God” flag while eradicating Christic energy on Earth. That he was a blasphemer and pedophile enhanced his Christian status.
For all his anti-Communist hoopla, he was the risen Pig of Orwell’s Animal Farm, a textbook oligarch and Erdogan wannabe.When asked by a foreign journalist what a redneck was, Donald replied, “Like me, except poor.” In so doing, he epitomized one definition of “classless” while subtextualizing the other; neither had class, manners, or empathy.
“The greatest trick in history,” said police officer Mike Fanone, a Trump supporter who was tased and nearly killed while defending the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, “was Donald Trump convincing redneck Americans that he somehow speaks for them. He will destroy this country simply for the sake of his ego. . . .”28
For all the triumphs and satisfactions he brought to his fans, they should never forget: he will cancel you, your spouse, parents, and children as quickly as King George would wop a serf or Vladimir Putin would poison his rivals or aim missiles at apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals in Grozny and Mariupol. He is not your friend because he is no one’s friend.
•A yard placard in Indiana, a parody or covenant (it hardly mattersz), declared, “God Bows Down to President Donald J. Trump, Declares He Is Perfect.”29
Bussa Krishna, a thirty-six-year-old man in India was so stoked by Trump’s ascension that he had a life-size statue of him constructed as a shrine in his garden. Shree Krishna explained, “Instead of praying to other gods, I started praying to him . . . my god, Donald Trump. My love for him has transformed into reverence. Every Friday I fast for Trump’s long life. I also carry his picture and pray to him before commencing any work.”30
That’s the effect Trump had on West Virginians and Wyomingites, though it took a Hindu to explain divinity and guru worship to Christians.
When Trump became ill with COVID-19, Krishna, in tragic couvade, died of non-COVID causes.
•POTUS 45 showed how ephemeral, vulnerable, and shallow our institutions of governance and sociopolitical norms were, that a crime family could swing more swag than a two-hundred-year-old justice system and two millennia of common law. A Queens and Jersey hood, an overblown Tony Soprano, wiped every rule of law, sanction on payola, emoluments, and extortion, and traditionally accepted limits and separations of power, while converting pretty much the entire Republican Party to his bent with the ease of “get that shit outa here, I’m MAGA man!”
Trump didn’t compromise or dishonor the Presidency. He exposed how paltry it always was. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan did their parts, but Trump iced the cake and put a maraschino cherry on top.
That he was able to bully or seduce pretty much every politician, judge, diplomat, and foreign leader showed that the whole planet had declined to the level of a corrupt ward.
Endnotes
8. Don Byrd, Facebook post, January 14, 2021.
9. Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. XXII.
10. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 74-75 and 208; internal quotes from Henry G. Frankfurt in Time Magazine.
11. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 142.
12. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 138-139.
13. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 155.
14. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 142; internal quotes by Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True, p. 50. Lachman believes that Pomerantsev is a pseudonym for Vladislav Surtov.
15. Robert Costa, “Romney warns of ‘extraordinary challenge’ to preserve U.S. democracy,” Yahoo News, March 15, 2022.
16. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 72.
17. Paul Solotaroff, “Trump Seriously: On the Trail with the GOP’s Tough Guy,” Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015.
18. Rebecca Kaplan, “Trump: McCain Only a War Hero Because He Was Captured,” CBS News online, July 15, 2015.
19. Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, text altered to replace Major Amberson with Donald Trump
20. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth, p. 83.
21. Bryan Metzger and John Haltiwanger, “Fiona Hill says autocrats like Erdogan got mad when Trump 'had no idea what they were talking about' on calls,” Business Insider, October 5, 2021.
22. “Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’,” theguardian.com, October 24, 2022.
23. Mark Danner, “The Con He Rode in On,” The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2020, p. 36.
24. Robert Kelly. “On a Picture of a Black Bird Given to Me by Arthur Tress,” in Richard Grossinger (ed.), Ecology and Consciousness, p. 31.
25. Richard Matheson, “The Enemy Within,” Star Trek, season 1, episode 5.
26. See Zecharia Sitchin, The Earth Chronicle Expeditions.
27. This is a reference to Edward Dorn, “North Atlantic Turbine.”
28. Molly Ball, “The Good Cop,” Time, August 23-30, p. 43.
29. Pluralist, “Liberals Mock Conservatives for ‘God Bows Down to Trump’ Sign—Then They Learn Who Put It Up,” February 18, 2020.
30. Lee Brown, “Indiana Man Prays to Life-Size Statue of Donald Trump, ‘His God,’” New York Post, February 19, 2020.
* I am reminded of one biologist’s trope for fisher cats, ground hogs, and ferrets, “Kill them all and let God sort it out!”
xObsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder.
yStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
zEither way, the canonization of Trump speaks to an evangelical belief in his transubstantiation.
Comments:
Geoff Young, Poet, Painter, and Art Curator:
terrific!
and the folks to whom i forwarded it are ON Board!
Matthew Wood, Herbalist:
Depressing. . . and, no happy ending in sight.
I think, though, his wave has crested. Not yet crashed, though.
As a literary figure, who could make such a person up?
There was a good article in the NYer or Atlantic in 2020 spring about the country dealing with Trump in dreams. . . all sorts of dreams. I dreamed
About him. His methods: seduce, bully, buy, in that order. More recently again, I just dreamed he was a cross between a virus, the antichrist and death.
Matthew
Jon Klimo, parapsychologist
richard,
Thar piece on Trump you just wrote (Opera Jupiter) is a real tour de force. Wonderful.
Congratulations
Jon Klimo
Robert Silverstein, physician:
RG: I am not a big Trump supporter and don't want him to run in 2024, but your nasty screed calls for an apology & a deletion of that distorted nonsense u write here. And I say that as a friend. Even tho I am an MD, I will not formally diagnose you with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I have a common sense level of recognition that borders on that, Richard.
Peter Marin, social activist and educator
Richard:
I think it's getting away from you slightly here. The diatribe becomes too familair, goes on too long; the various conceits used before had more wit, more novelty, we jolting in some sense by forcibly shifting perspectives, a sort of charioscuro making the subject interesting in new ways. This latest instalment seems a step back, merely denunciatory, political, not just r Trump but also his supporters, the "deplorables." Your wit reads as if reduced to polemic, which the first two pieces transcended, and which were therefore much to be welcomed...
I'm only of course stating my own preferences' I'm sure this will be manna to you liberal followers, but I don't think that's what you were originally after...
Shooting dead fish in a barrel going over the falls...
Not you at your best.
Nice by the way to see you still at it. Me? I seem preoccupied these days w/ Thanatos
